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Swimming In The (astro) Pacific

Swimming In The (astro) Pacific

Aug 08 2012 | comment(s)

As a newly minted, 1 year old professor, this is the deep end of the astronomy edu cation pool. I am swimming in the insights and experiences of people with more experience than me. I recommend attending an Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting for this very reason. This is where you can find the answers to questions you hadn't yet realized were questions.

It will take a while for me to assimilate (and type; I am using a nook), but here are three tidbits.

If you give a planetarium show about supernovas providing the elements of life, and your visuals show supernovae, your audience will walk out raving about your cool show that taught them about.... how supernovas occur. The visuals were the story, not the voice-over narrative.

Omnilink Elite Stent System Receives FDA Approval For Treatment Of Iliac Artery Disease

Omnilink Elite Stent System Receives FDA Approval For Treatment Of Iliac Artery Disease

Aug 08 2012 | comment(s)

President Obama Backflip On Climate Could Win Hypocrisy Olympics, Say Activists

President Obama Backflip On Climate Could Win Hypocrisy Olympics, Say Activists

Aug 08 2012 | comment(s)

Climate change advocacy groups are not happy with U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern's recent statement at Dartmouth College renouncing a limit of 2 degree celsius (2C) temperature rise as a global goal for UN climate negotiations. Stern said that agreeing to a framework to achieve the 2C goal would "only lead to deadlock" and that a new agreement should give countries "flexibility." 

Gibson Guitar Settles With Justice Department Over Lacey Act Violations

Gibson Guitar Settles With Justice Department Over Lacey Act Violations

Aug 08 2012 | comment(s)

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Gibson Guitar Corp. entered into a criminal enforcement agreement resolving a criminal investigation into allegations that the company violated the Lacey Act by illegally purchasing and importing ebony wood from Madagascar and rosewood and ebony from India. 
Pyros Small Tactical Munition Scores Hit In Field Testing

Pyros Small Tactical Munition Scores Hit In Field Testing

Aug 08 2012 | comment(s)

Pyros small tactical munition completed a successful warhead and guidance system test, according to Raytheon.

There are three choices for guiding the weapon to the target: GPS coordinates, inertial navigation or laser designation.   There are also three options for engaging the target: height-of-burst, point-of-impact or fuze-delay detonation. The end-to-end test validated the weapon's guidance modes (semi-active laser and global positioning system), its height-of-burst sensor, electronic safe and arm device, and multi-effects warhead.
99 Phobias Cured! I Didn't Even Know There Were That Many

99 Phobias Cured! I Didn't Even Know There Were That Many

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

Afraid of flying?  Maybe there is something to that.  Dogs?  Okay.  But fear of buttons?  Puh-leeeze. The phobia business - legitimizing irrational quirks - has become Big Business and life change consultant Mark O'Donoghue of Purple Smarties in Stoke-on-Trent is ready to believe you.



In all, he has helped 99 people since he set up his business in 2008, he says. It isn't just your fear of buttons he can fix, he has also helped with more mainstream things like helping fat people eat fewer pizzas and helping dumb people smoke fewer cigarettes. 

Bottled Water is NOT linked to More Tooth Decay, Study Shows

Bottled Water is NOT linked to More Tooth Decay, Study Shows

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

“While bottled water users had significantly lower fluoride intakes, this study found no conclusive evidence of an association with increased caries,” according to “An investigation of bottled water use and caries in the mixed dentition,” published in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry.

American Dental Association spokesperson Dr.Jonathan Shenkin said, "There has been no research to show using bottled water causes tooth decay," in a Healthday.com article.

Science 2.0 Collaboration Update: Mendeley Dashboard Means Real-Time Impact Factor

Science 2.0 Collaboration Update: Mendeley Dashboard Means Real-Time Impact Factor

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

Medieval Masculinity And The History Of Celibacy

Medieval Masculinity And The History Of Celibacy

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

Medieval clerics did not like the prospect of giving up sex - heck, every man getting getting married dreads the part about giving up sex  - so even when they had to do so by Papal decree there was resistance to it. You think changing from a Latin to local language Mass was controversial? Genitalia are a lot more personal. 

Priests, of course, used to be married but that changed hundreds of years later after the foundation of Christianity. The justifications were that a priest should imitate Christ, who was celibate (unmarried), and still later there was an argument and decree that priests who were handling the sacraments had to also be unpolluted by sexual activity - chaste.
Carnival Of Cosmology: Bloggers On Dark Energy

Carnival Of Cosmology: Bloggers On Dark Energy

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

The Carnival of Cosmology: Bloggers on Dark Energy is now up and running on Matthew R. Francis' Galileo's Pendulum:

In the spirit of blog carnivals, several of us—cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, and writers who just love all these subjects—decided to write about one of the abiding mysteries of modern cosmology. That mystery is dark energy, the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
The Memristor: Another Science Scandal

The Memristor: Another Science Scandal

Aug 07 2012 | comment(s)

In 2008, “The missing memristor found” [1] was published in the respected science journal Nature, and this claimed discovery was announced on the front pages of most major newspapers. This “discovery” is simply a misinterpretation of devices that had been discovered many years before in India [2,3]. Those original inventors did not misinterpret their work in order to make it into the news. Given the serious doubts that have been presented in many places, one seriously wonders whether the fact that the cheated are ‘just a bunch of Indians in India’ has anything to do with the embarrassing situation of that most science media and bloggers do not care.

PETA Declares War On The US Army Over Goats

PETA Declares War On The US Army Over Goats

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

PETA, People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals, doesn't always make sense.  They protest objectifying dead fish, for example, by objectifying live women.  Actually, they show more naked women than Playboy, their marketing campaigns are littered with exploited females.(1)

Now they are critical of the US Army, but not for hurting fellow humans. Rather, for hurting goats.
Genetically Modified Humans Doing Really Well In The Olympics

Genetically Modified Humans Doing Really Well In The Olympics

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Usain Bolt runs faster than you.  He makes it look easy but he certainly works hard at it.  He also has an advantage you don't - the right genes.

Is that random?  Maybe.  Mutation and genetic drift and random walks are all aspects of how we got to where we are but we may be on the road to creating better athletes too. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans writing in Nature News note that almost every male Olympic sprinter and power athlete ever tested carries the 577R allele, a variant of the gene ACTN3.

About half of Eurasians and 85% of Africans carry at least one copy of this 'power gene'(Berman, Y.&North, K. N. Physiology 25, 250–259, 2010).
Fainting May Be In Your Genes

Fainting May Be In Your Genes

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Fainting, also called vasovagal syncope (by about five neurologists and no one else), is a brief loss of consciousness that occurs when blood flow to the brain drops.  Its causes are so numerous that it is basically unknown what causes it - everything from dehydration to medications to pregnancy, heart conditions and age - but these triggers all occur among people who have a strong genetic predisposition, according to new research.
Gaydar Located - It's In The Eyes

Gaydar Located - It's In The Eyes

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Does gaydar exist?  If so, it's in the eyes.

Sexual orientation can be revealed by pupil dilation to attractive people, say researchers who used a specialized infrared lens to measure pupillary changes of participants watching erotic videos. Pupils were pretty accurate: they widened most to videos of people who participants found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on the sexual spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual.
Anti-Science Activists Call Medical Research Workers Pedophiles

Anti-Science Activists Call Medical Research Workers Pedophiles

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Medical science has done miraculous things - namely saving billions of lives.  But anti-science activists are driving workers who develop new drugs out of research, by attacking them and and smearing them as pedophiles to introduce a 'chilling effect'.

One female Harlan Laboratories worker told the Observer: "When you arrived in the morning, you would have to queue for up to five minutes to get through the gates. Their loudhailers were deafening. They would scream at you that you were a puppy killer and would bang on your car. It was horrible. I was left shaking for hours afterwards."
Markerless 3-D Motion Capture From A Single Camera

Markerless 3-D Motion Capture From A Single Camera

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Conventional motion capture for film, like Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and game production ("Mass Effect 3") involves multiple cameras and actors festooned with markers but the future of motion capture may look much different.

A new technique not only captures the 3D poses of actors, like with traditional motion capture systems, but derives "biped controllers", which are programs that incorporate the underlying physics of the motion. Bipedal controllers generate the poses by computing the forces acting on the body and integrating them over time.
Implicit Association Test: Are You Secretly Racist? (Hint: You Are)

Implicit Association Test: Are You Secretly Racist? (Hint: You Are)

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

It's American election season and that means it is time for psychologists to introduce racism again - not whether you are racist, but how much.

Well, only white people are, said a talk at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association. Even if they do not have any racist thoughts or lock their car door when they see a young, black man on the sidewalk and voted for Obama in 2008, white people still are; and their racial attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may be a significant factor in this year's U.S. presidential election. A survey says so.
Mustache Transplants - An Update

Mustache Transplants - An Update

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

It is believed that the first mustache transplants were performed by the late trichological pioneer Dr. Okuda in 1930’s Japan.

Since then, considerable progress has been made – some of which is described by Dr. Damkerng Pathomvanich (pictured) of the DHT clinic in Bangkok, Thailand who is a key contributor to Hair Restoration Surgery in Asians 2010, Part XII, Where Dr. Pathomvanich explains that -
Photosynthesis and organic food

Photosynthesis and organic food

Aug 06 2012 | comment(s)

Organisms can be divided into autotrophs, which can synthesize their own food using inorganic minerals, and heterotrophs which require organic food.  Plants produce organic compounds from simple compounds but cannot produce so-called “organic food” from “organic products”. The heterotrophs can do it and most plants are not heterotrophs. Plants are autotrophs. Hence all labels of “Organic food “ are misnomer untils and unless someone explains what is meant by “organic food”  and “Organic farming”.

Here the basic process of production of food by plants is  presented in a simplified way.